2003/12/31 by Bruce A. Bassett, M. Kunz, Martin Kunz · 3 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Galaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena #Gamma-ray bursts and supernovae #astro-ph #gr-qc #hep-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.69.101305
published as Phys.Rev. D69 (2004) 101305 · 6 pages, 4 colour figures. Version accepted as a Rapid Communication in PRD
arxiv created 2004/04/15 · openalex publication_date 2004/05/26 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
In cosmology, distances based on standard candles (e.g., supernovae) and standard rulers (e.g., baryon oscillations) agree as long as three conditions are met: (1) photon number is conserved, (2) gravity is described by a metric theory with (3) photons traveling on unique null geodesics. This is the content of distance duality (the reciprocity relation) which can be violated by exotic physics. Here we analyze the implications of the latest cosmological data sets for distance duality. While broadly in agreement and confirming acceleration we find a 2-sigma violation caused by excess brightening of SNIa at z>0.5, perhaps due to lensing magnification bias. This brightening has been interpreted as evidence for a late-time transition in the dark energy but because it is not seen in the dA data we argue against such an interpretation. Our results do, however, rule out significant SNIa evolution and extinction: the ``replenishing'' gray-dust model with no cosmic acceleration is excluded at more than 4-sigma despite this being the best fit to SNIa data alone, thereby illustrating the power of distance duality even with current data sets.